I was once interviewing for a job as a senior engineer/lead role. The CTO - my eventual manager - was asking me a lot of high level technical questions even though he was a very competent developer.
Then, another developer who had been there for a decade asked me how I would go about writing “address validation routines” - It was a real world problem he was facing. I told him that I wouldn’t. That’s not the vertical the business was in. The best code is the code that you don’t have to write. Address validation software is a solved problem and there are plenty of third party CASS solutions and yes they cost money but being able to write address validation software is not the company’s competitive advantage or its differentiator in the market. It’s better to outsource it. That’s one less thing we would have to maintain and debug.
The developer wasn’t impressed. The CTO was.
I’ve spent my entire career asking questions and making sure we were building the right things.
My first job out of college over 20 years ago I was the sole developer on a project to write a data entry system that was used by a new department with a dozen new employees. I had to actually talk to our potential client to gather specs myself.
> I’ve spent my entire career asking questions and making sure we were building the right things.
But this gets back to what OP was saying. Spending time asking questions == spending time in meetings. Not writing code.
I’m not advocating for never asking questions or suggesting better ways, just saying that I prefer to work where someone else handles the bulk of that so I can focus on what I specialize in.
Then, another developer who had been there for a decade asked me how I would go about writing “address validation routines” - It was a real world problem he was facing. I told him that I wouldn’t. That’s not the vertical the business was in. The best code is the code that you don’t have to write. Address validation software is a solved problem and there are plenty of third party CASS solutions and yes they cost money but being able to write address validation software is not the company’s competitive advantage or its differentiator in the market. It’s better to outsource it. That’s one less thing we would have to maintain and debug.
The developer wasn’t impressed. The CTO was.
I’ve spent my entire career asking questions and making sure we were building the right things.
My first job out of college over 20 years ago I was the sole developer on a project to write a data entry system that was used by a new department with a dozen new employees. I had to actually talk to our potential client to gather specs myself.